Have You Been Hit With a Penguin or a Panda?

Do you know what it feels like to have been hit with a penguin or a panda? For those readers outside the web design or search engine optimisation game, these are the colourful titles Google has been using to brand particular updates in their algorithms.

Which algorithms? The ones they use to work out which websites to return in results when people type a word or phrase into Google. Google is making these changes to get rid of spam sites or sites that have been doing SEO that is less than lily white pure.

Penguin and Panda can be thought of in a similar way to code-names for police or army operations. They are designed to identify people behaving in a way that is not acceptable to the powers that be, and "take them out" - not in a hail of bullets but a barrage of pixels.

If you are lucky and your website has been hit, you may just be wounded which means you disappear down a few pages. If you are unlucky you could be mortally wounded and see your traffic from Google flat line. Who knew the internet could be like an episode of ER!

To save you the long, boring story, littered with the carcasses of websites now gone to the great digital graveyard, here's a quick list of 10 things that will get you into trouble.

If you have done any of these, it is likely there is a panda or penguin with your name on it that has either already hit you or has a really mean look in their eyes.

10 Things That Will Kill Your Website

1. Pages written purely for search engines & not humans - These are the ones so stuffed with keywords that they sound like gibberish and are almost illegible.


2. "Spun" articles or content - Content recycled through content spinning sites to generate hundreds of articles from one piece through the use of synonyms.


3. Any auto-created or scraped content.


4. Linking schemes - "I link to you so you link to me and we both win". Wrong! Now you both lose. This also includes bought links and too many links on a page. It also includes links in footers to other parts of the site if the link uses keyword rich anchor text. Links to "bad neighbourhoods" or low quality links. Often you may have attracted these if you outsourced your SEO to cheap SEO companies, used automated link building strategies or even automated article distributors.


5. Pages with hidden text or text in teeny tiny font - Your web person thought it was so clever to have keyword rich text white on a white background, or 4 point font in a huge block at the base of your website. It used to work. Doesn't now.


6. Madlib spam or doorway pages - Sites trying to rank for a geographic location by having identical content for each location except for the name of the town.


7. Exact match domain names (eg:www.widgetcopywriter.com.au) - This worked until this year. Now it is a no-go.


8. Too many spammy tags and categories if you use a Wordpress blog.


9. Comments on your site that are more spam that ham. Moderate, delete and block.


10. Your content quality is poor - it is full of spelling mistakes, has been stolen off someone else's site or does not say anything new or useful.

So what is working now?

Great content is King, Queen and the entire Court. You need interesting, quality content that is regularly replenished. Without great content on your website, nothing else you do matters.

You need to write for humans first and search engines second. Your number one goal is to help your clients and not game the system. This is where having a quality copywriter on board pays dividends.

And if you have been rolled by a penguin or a panda, you need to find a reputable SEO company who can work out if they can bring you back from the brink, or whether you are too far gone and need to start all over again.

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